Thursday Tech Tips

This Tech Tip post is a recommendation for the Ring Video Doorbell. This device has been one of the best IoT (Internet of Things) devices I have added to the house ever. Ring allows you to answer your door or monitor any outdoor areas of the house from anywhere.

If you use iMessages a lot then you know that the performance can become sluggish over time. The reason for this slowness is because messages keeps a history of contacts you have messaged both individually and in groups. Overtime, this will become a big and unwieldy list, which could become slow at populating when trying to start, find or contribute to a chat.

A quick tip today for those who own Garmin fitness devices that don’t automatically upload via WiFi. Such as the Garmin Forerunner 910 XT or 210 or Fenix v1. Recently, I noticed that my uploads using the Garmin ANT Agent or Garmin Express apps on Macs were taking a long time. They uploads were especially slow on sites like MapMyRun and RunKeeper that integrate with those apps. I figured, that part of the problem was that the sheer number of workouts I have recorded must be slowing down the process.

This example changes the background of the droppable element depending on whether there are an odd or even number of other elements dropped within it. There are probably more advanced uses of this functionality you can come up with. You can preview it here or copy and paste the code below into your own local file.

I thought I would share some thoughts on the recent Heartbleed SSL flaw that comprised potentially half of the internet sites out there including many popular ones you and I use. From facebook, to twitter, to yahoo and many others. I spent essentially a whole day changing passwords of dozens of sites and even with all that effort, I believe one of those sites which holds some of my credit card info, was compromised.

Based off of the hit game 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli but with a twist. Take your number matching to the next level with Power3 on iOS. The game is iCloud and Game Center enabled for saved progress and competitive ranking against friends. Why play by 2 when 3’s company. Available on the iTunes App Store today.

If you plan on loading a game to the App Store via iTunes Connect, budget a lot of time for additional configurations and sandbox testing. I had hoped you could programmatically invoke the leaderboard and achievements but, they have to be predefined with icons, descriptions, titles, etc. This level of configuration is what makes the iTunes App Store what it is, but it is just one more task that can seem very tedious when trying to push out even the most bare bones app. I now know why game development takes so many team members.

I came across a slew of really cool tech tools and gadgets this week. So, I will share a few of the choice ones here. I really geeked out on a lot of these tools and technologies this week. My three favorite are below covering three specify areas, hardware, software and learning.

At work I do a lot of prototyping against API services that come from both internal and external sources. If you are on a Mac and testing locally a web page that leverages API calls from the client side in the Safari browser, there are no issues there. It is when you want to host these files and share your demo that issues arise. I am not a command line jockey, so configuring test boxes for server-side REST calls is not something I like to spend a ton of time on. So, I often have to rely on a Cross Domain Scripting hack or two for my client-side calls to work.